This was an unusual week. On Wednesday we had a film crew over at Harvest HQ all morning. We were filmed for a video customer story for Voxel, the awesome hosting company Harvest depends on. Work went on as usual, except that we had cameras following us as if we’re in a reality TV show.

Our product team made great progress this week: an important system security update will be deployed this upcoming Wednesday, the Backbone.js project I mentioned last week is going strong (hope to have a beta release this month), and we’re about to begin an exciting integration, which you’ll be hearing soon.

Naama found this recent interview with John Pavlus on The Setup, and he said, “I rely on an extremely well-designed webapp called Harvest for my freelance backoffice tasks like time-tracking and invoicing… Harvest is a lifesaver, well worth the small monthly fee.” Thanks for the shout-out, John!

Friday was an important day for Jonathan Lane, who checks into Harvest each day from Mayne Island, BC, Canada (if you plan to visit, he asks that you first watch this video). Jon was a happy Harvest customer, and joined our support team one year ago. These days he leads up the Fireteam and diagnose potential bugs reported by our customers. We’re lucky to have the amazing Jon on our team!

There you have it. Hope your coming week is smooth, interesting and productive. See you soon.

A couple of days ago I read this article about the newly designed #taxioftomorrow that will start appearing on New York streets in 2013. There were a lot of interesting tidbits in the article, among them, the yellow color is going to be brighter, the floor mats will be made from recycled materials, and the sound of the honk is changing. But what really struck me was the story of how Nissan, an automotive manufacturing company nearing its 80th year of operations had to learn how to behave like an agency.

For the Nissan designers every decision needed to be vetted internally and then approved by the client. Some decisions that Nissan thought would be easy approvals became lengthy discussions. One such decision was the partition between driver and rider. Wanting to embrace technology, the Nissan team pitched the idea of an intercom system. David Yassky, NYC Taxi Commissioner, didn’t approve. In addition to worrying about sound quality, Yassky shared a widely held belief by Drivers – connecting with riders generally earns them a better tip.

In my previous life at a large corporation I was always on the client side of agency interactions. Giving creative feedback was never easy, I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. However, as a brand manager I knew my job was as an advocate for the customer and the company. If my feedback was focused on customer insights, it was generally well received and aided in the creative process. The story about the divider reminded me of this. It’s a great example of a client and an agency working well together. Yassky didn’t tell Nissan that he didn’t like the closed divider, he told them about his customers’ needs. In this case the drivers’ need to make human contact.

For an old product company and a bunch of city politicians, this article portrays a relatively smooth process. I can’t wait to ride in the result!

We know. We’ve been a little sparse on the blog lately. Aside from taking a needed break last week to hack, we have been busy improving Harvest. Our product folks are split into three teams: one working on a big feature that is ready for an internal alpha next week, one pushing through a couple of big system updates (the recent Ruby upgrade and an upcoming security patch), and one team dedicated to squashing bugs and improving minor interactions in Harvest. We believe in continuously improving the application – so you, the customers, can have a smoother and better experience.

One little tidbit to share about the big project we’re working on: it’s using CoffeeScript and Backbone.js, both created by our fellow NYCers. It’s going to be cool, we promise.

This past week was our first Harvest Hack Week of 2012. Our team took three days off from the normal project schedule to hack on side projects and experiment with new technology. On Friday, we had a one-and-a-half hour presentation on the projects: two mobile web apps using Backbone.js, one Rdio integration, a Chrome extension, an embeddable JS tool, and an experiment with our system logs and stats. We also had a few people who took the opportunity to learn programming on Code Academy.

We’re super excited about the Hack Week projects! In the coming weeks, some of these will be released to the public, some will be in open source form, and some will become “core” projects (as in, made into the Harvest application). We will share some of the lessons learned on Tech Time, our recently released engineering blog.

In between the hacking and fixing small bugs from the recent big Ruby upgrade (for a faster, more stable and secured Harvest), we bantered on Co-op:

Monday, we welcomed Evan to the team, who quickly won us over with a picture of an adorable Jack Russell Terrier.

“Together” vs “Multiplayer”, a great article about language in design, via Lettini.

A message from T.J. at 12:30am: “Want some nice white noise to go to sleep? Just drop a `rbenv install 1.9.3-p125` and LISTEN TO THOSE FANS GO WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR” We had some trouble with Pow and rvm after the Ruby upgrade, and we’re now using rbenv.

This week, a bunch of Harvesters travelled back from SXSW, and we have a few morecoolcomicstrips to share with you (by our designer, Kim Ku). Barry, T.J. and Warwick have been working hard to prepare for the big Ruby upgrade this Saturday. Oh, and Harvest for Mac is now the number 1 top free app (in the Business category) in the Apple App Store, and received a 9/10 review on AppStorm!

Another week has come and gone here at Harvest. You thought time tracking couldn’t get any easier? On Tuesday, we took things to a whole new level by kicking off our Harvest Everywhere endeavors with the launch of Harvest for Mac. In addition, we’re also excited about two new integrations: ScrumDo and ZenCash.

Twitter was abuzz this week with a lot of excitement about Harvest for Mac. Here are just a few of the notably excited customers:

@awelfle – @harvest Especially with the new Mac App — I’ve been super accurate with being able to use hotkeys!

@peaker – The new @harvest desktop time tracker for Mac is super handy. Forgetting to stop the timer is so yesterday.

Just like that and we’re two months into 2012 (which I’m still referring to as the new year — is it time to stop that?). This past week, we released the new password section in user profiles, and we’re just about done with a brand new, interactive projects section. It’s a little behind schedule; here’s a great analogy on Quora that might help explain why that might be (we should mention that we’ve made it past Santa Barbara and we’re just a few miles away from LA proper – but you know, the traffic can be bad on Route 1). We’re also getting ready to release two exciting projects, both are done on our end, and just waiting for some feedback from others. One is the new and amazing Harvest widget for Zendesk. The other project looks something like this:

As usual, a round up of things Harvesters shared on Co-op and elsewhere:

Danny registered Harvest for SXSW Ball! Looks like we will be against Gilt City in the first round.

Barry found some music that would, supposedly, enhance your productivity while programming (we cannot guarantee success!).

Our intern Joschka presented the new ticker he built (scroll down to the middle) at NYC.js. Yes, the ticker is completely CSS3 and using no graphics, (open source available soon).

This week found the team a little under the weather, with Harvesters both local and remote falling victim to seasonal maladies of one sort or another. In hopes of making everyone feel a little better (sick or not) I made some cookies that went over pretty well. After being accused of “just trying to fatten everyone up,” I decided to take the healthier route and brought in some home-made kale chips on Wedensday. Don’t forget, folks. Eat more kale.

We spent the week gearing up to roll out the next phase of our new user profile page – coming next week! Additionally, Joschka made his first deploy as a Harvester. Check out the work he did on our updated Careers page (and see if you can find the secret link!).

Television we enjoy is often the subject of lunchtime conversation here at HQ, and in addition to the current obsession with Downton Abbey, we’ve started watching (and loving!) Sherlock. And we can hardly wait for the return of Mad Men on March 25…

Quick support note: Harvest will be closed this upcoming Monday, February 20 for Washington’s Birthday/Family Day. We’ll be back in action Tuesday after spending a little time honoring GW or just spending it with our families. See you next week!